


g r e y

by SchmokSchmok



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV)
Genre: Depression, I'm Sorry, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, More Hurt Than Comfort, it's just hurt, spoiler for season 1, tyler's hurting so much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 07:44:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10658034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SchmokSchmok/pseuds/SchmokSchmok
Summary: Tyler's world has always been grey. Until Alex changes everything.





	g r e y

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [g r a u](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/284526) by schmokschmok. 



> Sorry in advance if this is terrible.  
> I'm not a native speaker and it probably sounds awful. But. Here it is cause we all need more Tyler/Alex in our lives.  
> (If you've got any feedback for me, please comment! Even if it's just for my grammar/spelling/syntax. Thanks!)
> 
> If you're capable of speaking German: Read it in German.

His world has always been grey.

Grey hands, grey thoughts. _Now live and in colour_ never felt veritable because everything felt slightly far off, slightly deferred, slightly colourless.

He doesn‘t know when it started. Maybe in his childhood, maybe at his birth, maybe even previously to that. Maybe he‘s as to the manner born because of his mother with her gey jumpers, her grey stories and the colourless words, which should assure him that she loved him dearly. Maybe he acquired it at some point throughout his life and is not able to remember the colours everybody else seems to see. The only thing he can say with certainty is that he became accustomed to it and somehow embosomed it. He felt at ease in the monotony of un-sophistication, build himself a nest out of similar sounding words, similar looking patterns, similar feeling emotions.

 

It all changes when Alex comes.

Alex with his tremendously light hair and his remarkably dark eyebrows. Alex with his awfully light skin and his terrific dark nature. Alex who’s so incredibly in love with Jessica, and who hurts Tyler so unexpectedly with it without even lifting a finger.

Wrath is grey, wrath is consistent, wrath always feels the same, but sadness is nuanced, sadness doesn’t consist of only one colour, but rather far too much.

Tyler’s world is a bit thrown off track, and when it tries to get back to it’s original position in the evening, it doesn’t click and leaves him with dirty pale colour hues, which he doesn’t notice because he’s just so damn busy _not_ looking for Alex through his camera lenses, so that he doesn’t even get the idea that something could have changed.

 

It gets more colourful, when he receives the tapes.

Hannah hates him and he knows he deserves it. He knows he acted wrong and that he’s not able to wipe the slate clean. But the stones, which crash into his window but never smash it, scare him to death.

It’s cold fear; fear that almost feels like wrath. Fear about what happens if he doesn’t pass the tapes, but destroys them so that nobody will ever know what he did; fear that somebody will not stop at his window.

And he fears, too, that one of the stones is from Alex. ( _Must_ be from Alex, because Tyler is the fourth to have the tapes, and there are two big webs of fissures, which prove that Justin and Jessica were there. And Alex, too. And even if one of them hadn’t cast a stone … why should it be Alex of all people, who spared him?)

The sadness, which, thanks to this insight, settles in his gut, washes the grey from his hands, but not from his thoughts. His world spins a bit slower by the time he goes to bed and frenetically closes his curtains, in order that he can undress himself without the feeling to be watched from eyes of non existing people. But he doesn’t see the tender fawn of the backs of his hands or the blue iridescent veins of his palms. Because he’s to focused on studying the blurry transparency of his windowpane.

 

It happens while he’s photographing Alex. ( _For the yearbook, of course._ )

Tyler notices the shimmering of Alex’s nose ring for the first time, even though he knows Alex since the first day of school, and it confuses him, of course, because he always perceived Alex as an unity. As a extremely crass contrast between light and dark that never seems to be grey and therefore sticks out amongst all these grey people with their grey faces.

But now there’s this warm shimmer, which seems out of place amongst all these cold antitheses and nevertheless is so _alex_ that Tyler wonders how something that essential could slip his attention for months.

(There’s this one moment in which Tyler wants to scream at Alex. In which Tyler wants Alex to exculpate why he’s wearing this gold-coloured thing, and why it looks so warm and inviting, when Alex is the last person, which Tyler wants to feel invited by.)

 

At some point he’s got an awful lot of pictures of Alex. (But that’s irrelevant due to the fact that he’s got an awful lot of pictures of an awful lot of people. It’s nothing extraordinary. Just because the number under Alex’s file is almost twice as much as everyone else’s … _he’s a good subject for a photograph_. Tyler’s able to capture his contrasts. And for hours at home he’s after the grey that he’s got on the mind.)

 

It ends when Alex interposes himself between Bryce and Tyler.

Alex is the first to ever take a stand for Tyler, and probably the last one, too, since he’s black and white and light and dark, but never grey as everybody else. Everybody else, who’s just watching Tyler getting humiliated and insulted. Everybody else, who’s just accepting Tyler getting made grey and colourless. Because they don’t know it any other way. But Alex does.

And Tyler’s now able to see him with all his colours, which are as light and as dark as Alex himself. The black jeans, the white shirt, the light blond hair, the dark brown eyebrows, the gold-coloured septum and the silver-coloured skin.

 

 

He’s starring at his white-grey wall.

Not even three hours passed since he heard about it. Previous to the shot that sprinkled his black-white world with grey. _Definitely_ , it _definitely_ has to be a mistake. (He says that to himself while he goes to the dark room. _He_ bought the gun, not Alex. The grey should spill out of him onto the world, not out of Alex.)

His fingers are shaking as he develops his photos. His hands are shaking as he hangs the photos onto the line. One of Clay, of Bryce, Sheri, Jessica and Justin. Also with the ones of Ryan and Tony and Marcus and Zach. But the least calm are they as he hangs up the one of Alex.

Alex is as grey as everybody else. No black, no white, no light and no dark. A sophisticated mass of grey in grey in grey. Because deep inside Alex was equally grey, but nobody saw it. Since he hid it so well not even Tyler’s camera could see it.

Quickly he takes the picture down again.

 

Naturally, Tyler misses his colours whilest Alex is in the hospital.

However, Tyler doesn’t have the heart to take his camera and go to Alex to assure himself face to face how grey Alex actually is. (For the simple reason that he couldn’t bear realise that he’s been wrong from the beginning. Like he’s always wrong sooner or later.)

 

Everything’s grey.

He’s grey.

 


End file.
